Michael Arrington at TechCrunch reports that an American journalism student has been “saved” from jail in Egypt by using Twitter, the trendy “micro-blogging” site that lets people send micro-meaningful text messages to all their ostensible friends. UC Berkeley graduate student James Karl Buck found himself in hot water when Egyptian police arrested him, on no charge, while he was photographing a demonstration. Buck wasted no time in text messaging the word “Arrested” to his Twitter network of 48 people.

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The AP reports that the lower house of the French parliament has passed a bill that would criminalize the “public inciting of extreme thinness.” This controversial (and totally unprecedented) law is aimed straight at the fashion industry—designers, magazines, and advertisers in particular—which has long genuflected before the image of über-skinny models as a beauty ideal. (more…)

John Kanzius, a former businessman and radio technician who never graduated from college, may have discovered a way to kill cancer cells throughout the body without surgery, drugs, or side effects.

Kanzius was diagnosed with terminal leukemia six years ago, and after 36 rounds of chemotherapy and meeting children enduring the same, he decided to find a better cure. One night, he had a flash of inspiration, aided by his lifetime of experience with radio equipment. High-powered radio waves are harmless to human flesh, but will heat up metal particles. So if you can somehow lodge bits of metal into cancer cells, you can cook them with radio waves without damaging healthy tissue.

So he started playing around with his wife’s pie tins to try to reflect and concentrate radio waves, and ended up creating a prototype device that could send radio waves between two boxes. He then shelled out another $200,000 to create a more advanced, high-powered version, which he tested out with a copper sulfate-injected hot dog. If you’re hungry for details about how it works (or for a radio-cooked hot dog), read the patent; basically, the metal got hot, the rest of the doggie stayed cold.

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At least one species of proboscidean, a prehistoric relative of the elephant, lived in an aquatic environment, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The extinct water-lover, which belonged to the genus Moeritherium and lived around 37 million years ago, appears to have munched on freshwater plants and spent most of its days in swamps or river systems, according to Alexander Liu, an earth sciences expert at the University of Oxford and the lead author of the study. (more…)

German doctors recently solved a gripping medical mystery. Over a period of three to four months, 29 young people in the Leipzig area went to four hospitals with abdominal cramps, nausea, anemia, fatigue, blue gums, and diseased blood cells—and one patient had nearly gone insane. All were diagnosed with lead intoxication, which hadn’t been seen in Germany for decades. The patients were treated effectively using chelation therapy, but the authorities were scratching their heads over how these patients managed to expose themselves to such large quantities of lead.

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Steve Freeman, a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, compared the vulnerabilities of the two in his book, with some pretty alarming results. Among the problems he found:

–Unpredictable voting machine software is kept secret, while gambling software must be kept on file with the state.

–State inspectors randomly inspect gambling machines to ensure their software and computer chips haven’t been tinkered with. Voting machines don’t need to be checked, and no one knows what’s in them anyways.

–Slot machine manufacturers are subjected to background checks, while no one knows whether voting machine programmers have been convicted of, say, fraud (video).

–Gambling equipment is tested and certified by third parties, while voting machines are certified by companies of the manufacturer’s choosing (and payroll).

–In case of dispute, gamblers have access to round-the-clock investigators who can analyze machines. Disgruntled voters can (sometimes) file a complaint that may or may not be investigated. (more…)

Researchers at the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center have completed a new study finding that mice who exercised saw “significantly greater” growth in their prostate tumors than mice who sat on their butts and did nothing. The research team implanted prostate tumors in 50 mice and placed half of them in cages with exercise wheels, while the other half had no wheels. All of the mice were fed the same diet, and those with wheels ran a half a mile a day, on average.

According to Lee Jones, the study’s senior investigator, “among the mice that had the opportunity to voluntarily exercise, tumors grew approximately twice as fast as they did among the mice that did not have the opportunity to exercise.” The reason for the discrepancy, experts speculate, is that exercise could increase blood flow to tumors and thus encourage their growth. (more…)

I think it’s reasonable to assume that ever since the dawn of humankind, people have yearned to control lightning. (No, Halle Berry did not create this idea for her role in X-Men.) The first approach—rain dances, spells, and the like—proved marginally effective, at best, but there wasn’t much of an alternative. In the ’70s, scientists found out that if they launched rockets carrying long metal wires into thunderstorms, the wires would sometimes provide enough conductance to coax a lightning strike, much like Ben Franklin’s (probably apocryphal) kite string. But around the same time, they also thought it would be much, much cooler to use a laser to bring about lightning. Most things are cooler when accomplished by lasers, as any scientist can tell you.

A group of European researchers working at South Baldy Peak have finally realized this longstanding goal by successfully bringing about lightning by zapping lasers into thunderclouds in a recent experiment. The ultrashort laser bursts (only around a hundred femtoseconds) ionize some of the molecules in the air, forming a plasma, and these channels of plasma act can guide lightning strikes like the wires on a rocket. (more…)

• Are stars secretly zombie cannibals? A new study suggests that “dead” stars may consume their healthy neighbors, thus creating a large and mysterious cloud of antimatter in the center of the galaxy. Look for George Romero’s take, coming soon to a theater near you.

• A Bosnian man claims his home has been targeted by aliens, after the house was hit by meteorites five times. But before you write him off, consider this: Experts at Belgrade University have confirmed that the rocks are genuine. (more…)

For all those creationists out there wondering how to approach peer review in their brand new “journal,” Answers Research Journal, take heart: the latest edition has some friendly advice.

Despite the centrality of peer review to the development of a scholarly community, very little is known about the biblical basis and Christian conduct of peer review. We find that peer review is rooted in several Christian virtues, such as reflecting Christ, being honest, seeking wisdom, humbly submitting, showing Christian love, correcting error, and being accountable. Given these principles, we recommend that creationists use a double-blind peer review system, wherein the identities of the author and peer reviewers are confidential.

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